


happiness hit her like a bullet in the back

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: wait 'til you meet my little sister [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Character, Bisexual Female Character, Blood and Gore, Character Death, Corpses, F/F, Female Ben Hargreeves, Female Five Hargreeves, Female Klaus Hargreeves, Female Luther Hargreeves, Gore, Lesbian Character, Pregnancy, The Apocalypse ain't pretty kids, Trans Diego Hargreeves, Trans Male Character, Unplanned Pregnancy, the years between five disappears and the apocalypse, you know which one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-20 22:44:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19386046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: By the time Reginald Hargreeves dies, Lena’s in Ireland. Violet’s in L.A. with Allison (and so is Rachel, by default). Diego and Vanya are still in town, but they’ve actually kept up with each other over the years. When the funeral occurs, the last time they all saw the mansion was at Rachel’s funeral, but that wasn’t the last time they all saw each other.When Five finally shows up, it isn’t to the most dysfunctional family in the world- it’s to a family that’s trying its best, failing at times and succeeding at others.But one thing's for certain- no one here is grieving the man whose ashes are sitting in the urn in front of them, that's for sure.(How the Hargreeves girls (and their brother) spend the years between Five's disappearance and her reappearance.)





	1. Lena

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Dog Days Are Over" by Florence + the Machine and quotes in each chapter are from Nikita Gill.
> 
> Alright, so I have at least the first chapter and most of the second chapter written already (2nd is about Allison, Violet, Rachel, an unplanned pregnancy, and Violet getting sober), and I hope to write some more focusing on Diego, Vanya, and Five and the years in between. But for now, here's Lena! (Hope you all love my new favorite butch lesbian!)

_ Don’t ever let other people decide for you who you will be. _

_ You have stardust in your spine and veins that flow with galaxies. _

_ A whole universe resides inside your body. _

**_ And no one dares to tell a universe what it can and cannot be. _ **

 

Lena doesn’t end up on the moon. She doesn’t get turned into half an ape. She doesn’t become a ghost in her own home, haunting the halls until the next mission comes in, because she’s long gone by the time the mission comes around that would have ruined her.

Rachel dies, and Lena is the leader. She is the only member of the Academy left. She is the last hero, the last daughter to hold on. She is the perfect soldier, the perfect hero, the perfect daughter, just as she's always been.

She has spent so long being the strong one, the protector, the last remaining hero. She has been everything the media has said that she had to be, everything that Father reinforced, everything a hero had to be and everything a little girl wasn’t supposed to be.

And look where that’s gotten her. Look at everything she’s failed to do, everyone she’s failed to save, the team she failed to keep together. Look at all of her siblings, gone from the house some way or another. Look at how much these expectations have cost her.

Lena looks at the statue of her sister in the courtyard and realizes that you know what? Fuck it. Fuck the rules and the expectations and the failures. 

Lena’s done with the pressure to be the best, to be the strongest. Being a superhero led to one sister’s disappearance and another sister’s death. Being a superhero has only led a broken team and a broken family and tragedy.

She can’t fail if she’s no longer trying to succeed. If she changes the game, changes the rules, then she can’t lose. 

So she packs up a backpack, grabs some money from Dad’s safe (because Dad always saw her as the trustworthy one, the dedicated one, and thus trusted her with the code to at least one of his various safes), slings on one of Rachel’s old hoodies, and just leaves.

Lena leaves the house. She leaves the mansion, becomes the last of Reginald Hargreeves’ children to abandon the house that raised and broke them. She leaves a life that crushed her into a very particular kind of girl- angry and dedicated and strong and the perfect fucking soldier.

(It doesn’t take the end of the world to strike the final blow on the Umbrella Academy, to brandish it a failure- it takes Lena standing at the door of her childhood home and deciding never to come back.)

* * *

In the years after she leaves, she travels the world, picking up odd jobs that require someone with lots of strength and earning money that way. As children, she and her sisters (and Diego) had been required to learn a second language and she'd chosen German- over the next few years, she picks up a passable amount of Spanish, Japanese, French, Hindi, and Arabic as well.

She meets girls in plenty of countries, figures herself out, learns to embrace her haircut and style as not just a shield, as a representation of strength, but as an outward representation of style. She goes to clubs and dances with girls who like her short hair and her combat boots, her hard syllables and her dedication. She has one night stands and dates and relationships, sleeps with a few of the women and kisses even more.

She learns that the world is so much bigger than the world her father created for his children, learns that being a failure by her father's standards means nothing when compared to everything she is able to build for herself in the world. She learns what the word 'fun' means, realizes that enjoying herself isn't selfish.

Lena has always been a woman who throws her everything into things, who dedicates herself to something more than herself. And here and now, she dedicates herself to learning more, to seeing more, to  _be_ _ing_ more.

She is more than just a soldier. She is more than just her strength. She is more than just the failed leader of a team of failed heroes.

Lena Hargreeves isn't going on missions. She isn't saving the world. She is building a life for herself, helping people in small ways along the way, and that's enough. She doesn't regret leaving the house, no matter how many missed calls from Father end up on her voicemail.

Fuck the expectations and the rules and the failures. Lena Hargreeves will never be that girl again.


	2. Allison, Rachel, and Violet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Surrogacy is fucking amazing and admirable and it may arise out of strange circumstances, but I have the most utter respect for anyone who decides to go through it, whatever their motives might be.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, warning for implied/referenced prostitution. Kinda. It's complicated. Welcome to the Hargreeves, everybody.

**_Some people are born with tornados in their lives, but constellations in their eyes._ **

_Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea._

_The 13 billion year old atoms that make up the seas are the same that run through the bodies of you and me._

_Our bodies were made to house oceans of galaxies, and our souls are rivers that have flowed through centuries._

 

Violet Hargreeves is bi. This isn’t that strange amongst the Hargreeves siblings- nearly all of them are queer, as far as Violet’s aware. Allison’s ace, Five is who knows where, Diego is trans, Vanya is bi (Violet thinks, at least- the two of them had a few too many conversations about how gorgeous Beyonce was as kids for Vanya to not be at least a _little_ queer), Rachel was bi before she died, and Lena’s the butchest lesbian around. Being queer isn't that strange amongst the children of Reginald Hargreeves.

What _is_ different, however, is that Violet is currently sitting on a toilet seat, staring at a stick with two thick, solid lines on it.

“You’re pregnant,” Rachel says behind her, braid dangling over her shoulder, and Violet’s not sure if she wants to puke or not.

Violet’s had sex plenty of times for drugs. All of them have been consensual (though there were quite a few almost-encounters that verged on the not-so-consensual), and every time she’s made sure that both she and the guy were on birth control. (With the ladies, it didn’t matter so much.)

Violet doesn’t know who the father is. The guy could be any of dozens of men who she's fucked (or gotten fucked by), some fucker whose sperm clearly made its way through the condom and got her knocked up. 

Well, that doesn't really matter, because, fuck. Violet’s stuck with a choice. Either abort or have a baby.

And damnit, Violet _really_ doesn’t want a kid. She never has. So the choice seems to have a logical conclusion. Get rid of the tiny fetus inside of her while it’s still just a collection of cells, before she has to think of it as something actually alive. Done. No questions asked. No regrets.

But then she thinks about Allison, who’s always wanted kids but never naturally, who left home at such an early age but still stayed long enough for all of her siblings to learn about how much she wants both to be an actress and to be a mom.

So Violet calls Allison using the phone that Allison still pays for after all these years- the only connection Violet has had with her celebrity sister since even before Rachel died. "Hey, sis, I'm pregnant," Violet says, not even attempting to cushion the news. "Didn't you want a kid?"

There's a long pause on the other end of the line, eventually ended by Allison's curious, though slightly suspicious: "What are you offering, Vi?"

Violet nearly smiles past the nausea curling in her stomach. She hasn't heard Allison use that childhood nickname in  _years_. "Me having your baby, sis. What else does it sound like?"

"You'd be willing to do that?" Allison asks, voice slightly suspicious, which makes sense, because Rachel has always made it completely clear that she is about as unwilling to bear natural children as Allison is. But since she  _did_ accidentally get pregnant, and Allison wants the baby, and Violet won't have to raise the baby, Violet is okay (or, at least, okay  _enough_ ) with carrying it to term.

"Yeah," Violet says, looking at Rachel, who's leaning against the wall, watching her with dark, patient eyes. "I'd be willing to carry the baby to term for you, as long as you're the one who does all the raising and taking care of it after that."

"Then I guess I should offer up my place, if you're good to fly here," Allison says, and Violet's eyebrows shoot into the air. Well, she'd been expecting a  _yes_ , but not that big an offer.

"Wait, what?"

"I don't know where you're staying now," Allison says, "But it's probably not as good as the house I have, on the salaries I have. And I want you to be comfortable through the pregnancy."

Well, that sounds perfectly logical. Violet looks around the tiny hotel room she's staying in now, that she probably won't be able to afford for more than a few more days without finding herself another dead-end job or a guy or girl she can fuck and sleep at their house. "If you can pay for the plane tickets, then sure," Violet says, and Rachel's eyes fly wide open.

"Of course I can," Allison says, "When do you want them for?"

Violet calculates real quick the money she has on herself and how much it would take to book an uber and afford dinner. "Late this evening, some time, if you can make it," Violet decides, "Or tomorrow morning."

Allison sounds almost surprised. "That soon?"

"Why not?" Violet asks with a shrug, sending Rachel what she hopes is a reassuring grin.

"Well, I can get that done as soon as I get done shooting this scene. Shouldn't take more than an hour or so. And if I can't find something, I can get Jamie to do it for me."

"Jamie?" Violet asks, unsure exactly who her sister is talking about.

"My manager," Allison answers briskly, then swears. "Shit, calltime is in two minutes. I'll text you the details later for your tickets, okay?"

"Sounds great," Violet says with a smile.

"See you tomorrow," Allison finishes, and then hangs up. No "I love you," no "goodbye," but the Hargreeves have never really done that so Violet doesn't feel screwed over.

"Looks like we're going to L.A.," Violet says to Rachel with a grin.

- 

So Violet and Rachel (in her beautiful current ghost form) head to Allison's, where Violet spends the next few weeks getting completely sober, and it fucking  _sucks._ There are so many nights where Violet wakes up screaming from the ghosts around her, where she's shaking from the drug cravings, where she wants nothing more than a way to block out all the bloodthirsty screaming around her.

But Violet knows she has to do it.

The baby inside of her will be Allison's, her niece, and Violet doesn't want to fuck up her niece or nephew. She doesn’t want to start the life of the baby inside of her, girl or boy, with an already lowered chance at not being fucked-up. She wants this kid to have a chance at being normal, at being  _okay_.

So Violet gets sober, and it’s a bitch, but it’s for that little baby inside of her. It's for her future nibling (which, by the way, is the best word in the fucking world), for Allison's child. She wants them to have the best life, and she's going to help as much as she can.

-

Sometimes, though, it's so hard to be so good-hearted and positive and altruistic.

Violet hates the pregnancy hormones, hates the nausea, hates the baby kicking against the inside of her body, hates watching her abdomen distend and grow.

Her period blood, which she could make into a weapon against dear ol’ Dad, is preferable to these strange feelings. She'd rather have dead things shedding out of her than to have living things growing inside of her, rather deal with pads and Ibuprofen and stained underwear than the bloating and contractions and nausea.

The only thing that makes it better is the future dream of her nibling and her sisters, the same things that got her through withdrawal. And she  _has_ to cling to that- she has no other option to make it through.

And speaking of sisters- well, another benefit to this whole "getting sober" thing is that the longer she's sober, the more powerful her ability gets. Which, on the one hand, means more ghosts, but on the other-

It means Rachel gets to spend longer and longer in corporeal form. At first, in the first few weeks, it's just a few minutes or an hour among the living other than Violet, but as the weeks and months pass by, well, Rachel gets to stay around for longer and longer, up to days at a time by the time the labor rolls around.

By the day she gives birth, she has someone on either side of her who she can squeeze the hands of. Allison’s on her left, holding onto her hand with blue gloves.

(Throughout the process, Violet might have cursed at Allison. Once or twice. Or maybe a few more than that. All loving, of course, but most statements punctuated by thoughts like this one: "I am never fucking doing this again, y'hear?" Violet says, "I hope you know that."

Allison beams at her sister through teary eyes. "I'd never ask you to."

"Good," Violet says, and goes back to pushing.)

And Rachel’s on Violet’s right, corporeal for nearly half a day, now. (Eight and a half months of being sober can do that to a girl.) Violet's just glad that her stalwart supporter is there, letting her hand get crushed by Violet's throughout the labor, without complaint.

When the baby finally emerges, red and squishy and screaming, Violet lets out an exhausted sigh of relief. Fuck, giving birth is a major bitch.

“It’s Allison’s child,” Violet groans to the nurse who holds up the swaddled baby a few minutes later, “Let her hold it.”

The nurse hands over the baby to Allison, who has the biggest, fondest smile on her face that Violet has ever seen.

“Boy or girl?” Rachel asks.

“Boy,” the nurse says as she helps some of the other nurses clean up, and Allison coos at the little baby in her arms. 

“I want to name him- wait, Violet, what was that series you loved so much as a kid?”

“Series of Unfortunate Events,” Rachel supplies as Violet just tries to breathe the pain, which is so great that she can’t even see any ghosts beside Rachel. Please, dear god, can she go back to drugs now? Maybe not the hardest hitters, but something a bit more than just some ibuprofen. "The main characters were Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire."

“I want to name him Klaus,” Allison says, giving Violet a brilliant smile, and Violet is sweatier and sorer than she thinks she’s ever been before but she can’t remember ever feeling this proud. (Other than maybe that time when she dropped all of her blood-stained clothing into her father’s laundry bin and ruined an entire load of his undershirts. Now  _that_ was a great one.)

“That’s beautiful,” Rachel says, and Allison smiles at Rachel.

“Good thing, you _are_ his Aunt, after all.”

- 

Three days later finds Violet, stitches in her abdomen, and Rachel, hoodie tucked around her, sitting on Allison's couch, Klaus in Rachel's arms. Allison's taking care of a few business details over her tablet with Jamie before she takes Klaus back, and Rachel is enjoying every moment of getting to hold her nephew.

(Violet, on the other hand, hasn't even held Klaus yet. She doesn't want to, and she doesn't see herself doing it any time soon.

“Well, we’re gonna have to head home soon,” Violet says, and Allison's head immediately snaps up to look at her.

"Wait, what? Why?" she instantly asks.

“Well, this is your home, not ours, and you've got the baby, now." The point seems to make a good deal of sense, to Violet. She did what she came here to do and now she has no reason to impinge on Allison's generosity any longer.

Allison, however, has always been one of the more headstrong of the Hargreeves girls. "No, seriously, Vi. Why are you going back? You could just live with me, as you have been."

Violet's brow furrows. "But I'm done, here. I gave birth to the boy- I'm done."

"You two are my sisters," Allison says, a similiar look of confusion mirrored on her face, "You are  _always_ welcome in my house. You can live here for as long as you want."

Violet has spent her whole life as the dark horse of the Academy, the undervalued and often spurned member of the team. She's been abused and ignored and in turn, she struck out at her father in all of the ways that wouldn't get her punished (and in plenty of ways that did). She's the one with the powers that were the least understood, the ones that revolted and disgusted their father the most (though, to be honest, Rachel probably came in a close second on that one). She's been the sister who no one else really spent time with, the sister whose abuses by their father went most unnoticed.

So now, hearing Allison say this, make this offer- well, it feels nice. It feels like being accepted for the first time in her life. It feels...well, it feels  _good_.

Violet exchanges a look with Rachel. Well, what have they got to lose? There's nothing left in their home city save a mansion haunted by old nightmares and a father who doesn't love them, and here, in L.A.- they have the possibility to be accepted, to find a way to make this work.

"Alright," Violet says, "I think we can make this work."

-

Allison never gets married. In another life, she Rumors herself a husband because she thinks that’s what her daughter needs- a mother _and_ a father to raise her.

But here, in this life, her sister, Rachel, actually is pretty maternal, and as she gets to spend more and more time corporeal as Violet stays sober for longer, Rachel helps Allison raise little Klaus. The kid grows up raised by his mom and his aunt, and he seems to be doing pretty well for himself.

As as for Violet, well, she doesn’t want to raise Klaus like Allison and Rachel do, but she does occasionally babysit despite her dislike of babies and children. Klaus is squishy-faced and bright-eyed (and hopefully completely fucking normal. She doesn't wish her "gift" on anyone), and loves exploring and learning everything about everything.

In the years that Allison and Rachel spend raising Klaus and Allison pursing her career, Violet puts her efforts into other things. She volunteers at the local home for queer youth who have been kicked out of their houses, serving food and giving advice and being a general adult chaperone and role model (and who in their right mind ever would have predicted that last one?).

Through her work volunteering at the youth shelter she meets Danielle "Dani" Katz, a war vet who left the army after a plane crash left her with a shattered ear drum and a prosthetic leg. Dani's a Jewish lesbian who loves volunteering, rom-coms, dancing, and 70s music. After work she introduces Violet to a few bars in the area (where they dance, and Violet is always the designated driver), eventually making out with Violet in the bathroom of one of them.

All in all, Violet's loving life in L.A. with her sisters and her girlfriend and even her nephew, and she wouldn't have it otherwise.


	3. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alright, so this passage is probably going to sound very familiar to anyone who read my "tell my father (this is my life)" series, as this is nearly the exact same "prologue" that I wrote for Five in that story. And that's for a very good reason- that's because I think that the Hargreeves siblings being girls has next to no influence on Five's life in the Apocalypse. It makes a few changes, but not many. Originally I wasn't going to include a section on Five, but then I was rereading my other stories and I knew that I needed to show just how much Five *doesn't* change, while all of other Hargreeves do. Five is still the same stubborn, prideful, dedicated, vicious, horrifying, loyal time-travelling assassin we all know and love, and so she doesn't change much. Isolation causes the same damage. I may have added a few scenes, ones that I just wasn't thinking about the first time (as well as one scene dealing with Female!Five cutting her hair), but I don't change much of the original, and I don't think I got rid of anything from the original, either.
> 
> So, I hope you all like it, and that no one gets too upset by how I utilized this piece.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, I listened to "Jenny of Oldstones" by Florence + the Machine while rewriting/writing more parts of this, and it really fits, if anyone wants to listen to it and get very strong feelings about female!Five wandering a dead world with the ghosts of her siblings weighing on her shoulders.
> 
> Also, warning for gore. And horror. This chapter is NOT pleasant, not at all.

_There are two kinds of people who look at the night sky._

**_Those that look up and see a graveyard of stars._ **

_And those that look up and see a sea of souls,_

_shining brightly to guide us home._

 

Five doesn't bury her siblings. She doesn't have to- they are already half-buried by rubble, and she is only thirteen. She doesn't have Lena's super strength, and at first Five doesn't bury them because she physically  _can't_.

Instead, she leaves the mansion in search of answers.

The world is wide enough that she only has to get used to the stench of rotting flesh when she returns home, to those unburied, rotting bodies.

For forty years, she wanders the earth, trying to find a way back home, and once a year, every year, she finds himself back at the mansion, in front of her siblings' dead bodies.

It's never the same day each year. She counts and counts the days, marking a small scratch on her arm with each passing day, and she knows she visits once every three-hundred-and-fifty-first day.

Soon, her arms are full of scars. They feel like absolution, some kind of reclamation, some way of grieving. (They feel like a way to make herself hurt half as much as they did, a way to make up for the survivors' guilt.)

In a world where everything is dead or dying, Five can't plant flowers for her siblings. She's not sure what's keeping her alive, without the oxygen, but she's alive and they're not and so she keeps going.

Five gets used to the scent of rotting flesh, to the way her siblings' bodies decay. She keeps returning until all there is left of his siblings is their bones, yellowing away in the sun. She still doesn't bury their bodies, decades into her search for a way to undo things. She keeps their bodies as a reminder of what she has to stop.

(And, in a way, the returning to her siblings, seeing their bodies, is almost another punishment in itself. Another pain to reflect theirs. She never returned to them during their lifetimes, and if she doesn't stop the Apocalypse, then they will never return alive to her lifetime, either.)

-

Five thinks, sometimes, about the bodies that await her at the mansion. Some of them were easily identifiable- Diego easiest, due to gender, and then Five thinks she pinned Allison correctly as well. The body with pierced ears and layers of eyeliner is most likely Violet, and the last one, with a blond buzzcut, is most likely Lena.

Five never finds Vanya. She never finds Rachel. 

She does, however, find Rachel's statue, half-broken on the ground, and reads the inscription, finds out that Rachel died six years before the Apocalypse. She realizes that her sister's death had nothing to do with the Apocalypse, that she died on just some ordinary mission, her and Lena.

But Five never discovers what happened to Vanya. She leaves almost no trace of being alive, no journals, no books, no nothing. Just an endless void and Five's faded memories.

And so she spends years wandering and wondering what happened.

- 

Five is alone, with only Delores beside her, and she knows she's going quietly mad but she doesn't care. She has one mission, and that's to save her siblings and prevent the Apocalypse. Her surviving is necessary for that end, and she's gonna make it happen.

(She sometimes thinks about blowing her brains out, on the nights when the sheer emptiness of the world seems to stretch forever and ever without end, but she knows she can't. She can't regenerate. She can't come back from death. She's the last one left, the only person with the ability to fix things, and she _has_ to save her family.

There's just no other option.)

-

Five tries to cling to the memories she has of her family, good and bad.

Mom, the way she tucked Five in as child, about the way she always smiled and always cared about them all. Five remembers the way Mom would never say a single bad word about them, no matter how bad they fucked up.

Her six sisters- no, one brother and five sisters, stop misgendering, stop _forgetting_ \- eating dinner together, training together, crying together. These are the memories that always surface first, this tense sense of togetherness, the way they'd all strained at the rules and expectations that Father had put on them.

The problem is that soon enough, she can only remember the grand concepts, the impressions of her siblings rather than the exact details. The quiet of Vanya, the crooked smile of Allison, the strict tone of Lena, the curve of Diego's throwing arm, the manic flair of Violet, the gentleness of Rachel, the kindness of Mom- this is all she is left with, after all of these years. 

She loses the color of their hair and eyes, the way they looked, the shape of their faces. She is left, instead, with the stench of their rotting corpses, the faces of her memories replaced by the half-rotten, half-bare faces of the bodies at the mansion. Nearly all sense memories of living sisters- and one brother- are replaced by corpses and blood and bones.

And of Dad? Well, Five has no good memories. Nothing gets replaced by new memories. She doesn't care about the man one way or another to hold onto the old memories.

(Five never finds her father's body, and she can never bring himself to give a fuck.)

-

Five goes through puberty. Her voice drops, she grows tits, her period starts, and, well...

She never really gets wet dreams, and she can't be too irritated by it. By age twenty two, she's pretty damn certain that she's asexual. Her interest in Delores has always been for her mind, independent of her lack of body.

Five's dreams never turn to sex. Instead, she dreams of her siblings and the world she once lived in, a world where her siblings are alive and so are plants and there were sounds other than the crunch of her heels and the drifting wind. She dreams of the ghosts that she's sure haunt this world as surely as they haunt her head, ghosts that Violet used to be able to see.

(When Violet was alive, when they were all alive, when their family was dysfunctional but  _still there_.)

Five stops dreaming of purple and green. She doesn't remember what the colors look like, after all. Instead, her dreams are stained with orange and black and gray and brown, the colors of the Apocalypse around her.

(The only reason Five remembers the color blue is because Delores' painted-on eyes are blue. As the years pass and the color flakes off, as the fabric of her uniform fades, she even forgets blue.)

Her hair grows as she gets older, too, and at first she keeps it pinned back in a braid, in some attempt at clinging to the way things used to be. But as time goes by, as she loses her uniform in favor of heavier, more insulated clothing that actually fits her, as she uses pads and forgets blue and forgets a world  _not_ saturated with the stench of death, she resigns herself to getting rid of the weight on top of her head.

When Five visits her siblings' corpses at age twenty-three, she cuts her hair, leaves the long, long braid next to their rotting corpses, almost as a tribute of sorts.

It's almost relieving, in a way, getting rid of all of that weight from her scalp, but in another, it crushes her. Because cutting that hair is almost like cutting off one of her final reminders of her family, one of the final proofs of the way things used to be. Cutting her hair leaves yet another dead thing in the hollow ruins of this mansion, in this graveyard of her childhood.

-

For forty years, she wanders and plots and marches. She deals with puberty and desolation and eternal isolation and loneliness by thinking of her siblings. She flips through the pages of her father's journals (the very few that survived) so often that the words start to fade, and she survives off of cockroaches and canned food and twinkies.

The days turn to weeks turn to months turn to years turn to decades, and her bones start to creak as her calculations take up notebook upon notebook, until there is a veritable library of calculations towering from her wagon and her makeshift houses across her travel path. She is getting somewhat old, somewhat weak, and she sometimes wonders if her brain hasn't taken a dive off of the deep end.

The firty-third year of her life- her fortieth in the Apocalypse- she returns back to the mansion. Her siblings' skeletons are still there, though nearly turned to dust by this point.

And then, somehow, a woman steps through the ruined front arch of the mansion and towards her.

(For forty years, there has been no one, no thing. Nothing has been alive save herself.

And now, there is this woman, with silver hair and a black coat and heels just like Mom's. There is life, impossible though it seems.

Yeah, Five's pretty sure she's gone insane by now.)

"I have a job offer for you," the woman says, mouth stained by the color of blood, and Five is just insane enough, just broken enough, just  _desperate_ enough, to say yes. 


	4. Diego and Vanya

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to one of my new favorite bromances/sibling relationships. I stan healthy siblings relationships and supporting each other. Also, I stan Diego and Vanya. Like, a lot.

_Your body was designed to contain a cosmic storm._

**_It is no wonder that sometimes your head and heart hurt so much that you may just explode._ **

_It takes a nebula, a cosmic storm of epic proportions falling apart to create a star._

_So be easy on yourself._

_You are a storm in transition, even as these words are being written._

 

Figuring out the fact that Vanya has powers takes quite a few years to do, but it does happen before that influential funeral. Because here's the thing about a girl, surrounded by girls, who grows up knowing that they all have something in common (they  _must_ have something in common, buried in blood and birth and cramping pain): similarities tend to get discovered. They tend to multiply.

Vanya goes to a doctor. It's for a routine check up, or at least that was the plan, but it ends up being so much more than that. Because that doctor asks Vanya if she's on any meds, and Vanya looks at that doctor, who looks so much like Rachel would have, if Rachel had been allowed to live, and she answers truthfully.

And that doctor tells her that the pills are unnecessary, that she shows no symptoms of anything that they are prescribed for. That they are actively harming her mental health and causing long episodes of depersonalization that have led to possible severe stunting in her emotional growth.

And Vanya gets angry. In another world, and another lifetime, the first time Vanya gets angry ends up with the world being destroyed.

But in this lifetime, a lifetime where all of Vanya's siblings got themselves out of that house, a lifetime where Vanya has watched as every single sibling has rejected their father and his ways, has claimed their own life for themselves, she takes a moment. She doesn't lash out immediately. She doesn't bring the world crashing down around her ears.

Instead, she gets to her apartment- she's not sure exactly how she got from the Doctor's office to her apartment, but she's definitely here- and calls Diego, the last of her siblings left in the city. 

(Diego is different, just like Vanya. There is something separating him out from the rest of the siblings, something that cannot be changed, cannot be altered, but something that he can choose to make his own. He knows what she's going through, at least somewhat. He can relate.)

"Dad lied to me," she says, and her usual quiet hesitance is gone, at least temporarily, instead replaced with utter resentment. (But the world isn't crashing down around her, not yet.)

Diego snorts, and when he speaks, his tone is more bitter than Mom's tea ever got. "That's not a new one."

"He's been drugging me for years without reason," she nearly spits out, and there's a pregnant pause on the other end.

"...Alright," Diego says, "That's a new one. Tell me about it."

Vanya bites her lip. "Can you..." Some of her anger slips away, just a little bit, replaced by nervousness. She's never reached out to a sibling before. "Can you come over to my house to talk?"

Diego doesn't ask why Vanya's uncomfortable talking over the phone. He doesn't need to. He, just as much as Vanya, knows that they have all picked up plenty of tics and habits after living under Reginald Hargreeves' sway for years. "I can over to your place within an hour- I've got to take care of a couple of things at the boxing ring first, coordinate some shit with one of the managers, and then I can be over. Will that work?"

His tone with her is gentle, and Vanya appreciates it. "Yeah, I can wait," she says, trying to take a deep breath, because she  _can_ wait. She has to. She can keep calm. She can figure out what's happening. She can do this-

-

Except by the time Diego gets to Vanya's apartment less than forty minutes later, it's clear that she can't. Because her anger and resentment at the drugs and all of the fucking lies has just been building and building, and by the time he opens the door, Diego finds Vanya standing in the middle of her small living room, hand on her violin case and the world- everything in the room- starting to swirl around her.

And this is when everything goes to shit.

Because Father hadn't just emotionally abused, drugged, isolated, and manipulated Vanya- no, it's not just that.

Reginald had lied to Vanya, somehow, gotten her to believe she had no powers and then stuck her on drugs.

Because Vanya has fucking  _powers,_ as evident by the room around her. She's just like her sisters and brother. She's just like them. And Father lied about it. 

Vanya bites her lip, trying to keep the tears in. Trying to keep her powers- whatever they are, whatever this is- from exploding outward, from destroying the world.

“I…” Vanya can’t form words. She can’t find a way to express the maelstrom of emotions threatening to drown her.

"Just breathe, Vanya," Diego says, voice as warm and comforting as Mom or Violet (on her good days), and she blinks through teary eyes to find her brother standing in front of the couch, hands held up in a placating way. She doesn't know how he's so calm, especially with the lamp and pillows and blankets and even some decent-sized books flying around his head. "Do whatever you have to in order to keep from panicking."

Vanya wants that calm. She wants to feel grounded. She wants her head back.

So she does the one thing that has always been able to ground her, to allow her to focus, even when the world feels like it is ending: Vanya pulls out her violin and plays.

And the world doesn't end- instead, it comes to a halt. Everything goes quiet until it is only the sound of her bow against her violin's strings in the air. No pages flutter, no curtains move- no, everything freezes in place around them, the objects halting in the air.

As the last of Vanya's notes die out, there are no creaks, no birds chirping, no scraping noises from Jenny and Brian upstairs. There are no car horns, no traffic, no rain.

There is only Diego standing in front of Vanya and the sounds of Vanya's ragged breathing as she holds her bow above the strings of her violin.

"Did I just...?" she starts to ask, but there's a lump in her throat that she can't speak past.

"Stop the world?" Diego asks, and she nods, lowering her bow just a little. He nods in response, standing slowly as if not to frighten her. "Yeah, you did."

Vanya blinks. Whatever she was expecting, after she discovered the pills, after everything in the room started to fly, it wasn't this. It wasn't the entire world falling still under the sway of her music. It wasn't this utter silence, broken only by the occasional word or breath from her or her brother.

"Well, shit," she says. "I have powers." The words don't sound right in her mouth. She has spent her whole life being the not-powerless one, being the one who is outside looking in, the one who's been considered useless and unimportant. The ordinary one. The unwanted one.

"I'm sure there's some way to set it back to normal," Diego says, and she looks at him. _Really_ looks. At his calm, his acceptance, his attempts to comfort her and keep her calm, just like Mom.

To be honest, she hadn't expected that. She didn't know  _what_ exactly she expected, but it wasn't kindness. It wasn't acceptance. It wasn't understanding.

"Is this...Is this what it was like to realize that you weren't like us?" Vanya asks, and that's not exactly the question she meant to come out, because this is her finally learning that she's just like her siblings and Diego coming out was when he realized that he's  _not_ like his sisters.

But Diego still nods. "I-I guess," he says, his words stuttering a little, and he winces a bit, but she's not judging him. She understands anxiety and discomfort perfectly.

"Then I'm sorry if I wasn't as helpful as I could have been, back then," Vanya says, and Diego gives her a small, wry smile, a smile that conveys a level of past pain that she knows all too well.

"You did as well as you could while we lived in that house," Diego says, which isn't exactly the most forgiving statement in the world, but Vanya understands the still lingering resentment in his voice. She doesn't think that  _she's_ ever gonna get over what happened to her as a child, no matter how much she tries.

As they speak, the world slowly begins to move again, her curtains beginning to flutter and the sounds of the world suddenly filling the world again, and the moment of stillness and silence has passed. 

"Well," Diego says, and his voice is no longer stuttering. "I wonder what the fuck are the full extent of your powers, because that shit was insane."

Well, Vanya hopes that her powers can actually be used productively, that she can control them, though she knows that a lot of her siblings got stuck with powers that weren't the most convenient in the world (Violet has got to be number one for that) and just had to learn to live with it.

Either way, as she sets down her violin, she isn't as angry as she was when she picked it up. She has some hope for the future and not as much resentment toward the past.

* * *

Vanya doesn't tell anyone save Diego about this moment for years, and neither does he. Even as she learns to develop and explore her powers (realizing along the way that they are more _very_ powerful music-activated telekinesis rather than just the power to stop the earth), the day the earth stood still stays a secret between her and Diego.

They start to hang out together, though, spend more time together. Diego invites Vanya to the bar with Patch (who he's still working through his on-and-off, strained relationship with) and their other detective and police friends, and in turn, Vanya hesitantly extends an invitation to her recitals to him. She's nothing more than a third-chair violinist and there are plenty of nights when Diego's off on vigilante work, thus leaving her alone, but they both keep showing up to each other's events, keep supporting each other.

In general, it's rather nice for both of them, having someone they can talk to and depend on. For years, they've both been alone within the family in their own ways- Diego as the only boy, and Vanya as the only powerless one. It's no surprise that as they've gotten older, as they've gotten out of that house, that they've gotten a bit closer. That they've learned to reach out to each other and support each other.

For the first time in their lives, they each have a sibling in their corner. And it means a lot more than either of them have the emotional capability to say.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys all enjoyed! Anyone want any more?


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